In the end, we’re going to have to keep exploring if we want anything. This feels deliberate; give us a room with barely any of the functions available to us, get us excited to see what it can do, and then pull the rug out from under our feet. I shake my head as Pearl sends the blue back into its container, pull it off, and replace it with another colour. We repeat the process until we’ve scanned all the colours, each of which is ninety percent the same description as the others, save for the little blurb under each.

  Blue is resilience. Yellow is regeneration, red is destruction, and green is amplification. None of them go into more detail about those one word explanations, but when I combine them with the knowledge of how the construct heads detonated, I can paint a fairly complete mental picture. One that’s pretty much useless right now, but it feels nice to shed a little light on one mystery.

  Though it leaves one question unsolved. “What the hell is grey magic, then?”

  Pearl shrugs as she flicks the switch to turn off the panel. “I would’ve said ‘everything’, but maybe… manipulation? Or it could be a magic without any kind of tint, so it’s perfect for powering things. We’ll have more of it to actually test once we get more magic for the tower, so let’s just wait until we have a real answer.”

  I raise an eyebrow as she walks up to me and motions for me to pick her up. “Did using the control panel take it out of you?”

  “A little. Maybe I just want to be held.” Pearl flexes her fingers in a grasping motion. “I’ve been apart from you today more than… since we met, I think. Now I’m sure I don’t like it.”

  “Aw, love you too.” I reach down and make a little palm platform for Pearl to step on, then raise her to my shoulder. “So what do you want to do now? We could find something to analyze the construct bodies; the popup did allude to them somehow activating the magic.”

  She nuzzles into the corner of my neck and pulls her legs up so she can hold them with her arms. With a happy sigh, she looks over at the pile of construct bodies and silently thinks to herself.

  “We know they’re transportation constructs, so the magic must be activated because of that–and specifically to make sure the constructs get wherever they’re going. But I doubt the person the magic is being delivered to wants the kind that the constructs have, so they’ve gotta have something to undo it.” She glances at me with half-lidded, tired eyes, and yawns. “If we can reactivate one of them and get it to go to where it was initially supposed to, not attack the tower, we could follow it.”

  I nod along to her suggestion. “Good call. Do you have any idea how to reprogram or… deprogram these things?”

  She shakes her head. “Not right now, but I could probably figure it out. Should we try to think of a way that anyone could do, though? Because that’s probably the ‘right’ way to do it.”

  “Eh.” I shrug and motion at the machines. “One of these will work. Or maybe I can reprogram them in my inventory. I’ll give it a shot while you take a good long nap to recover.”

  “But I already took one today.” She grumbles, but doesn’t push too hard. “You’re sure you can do it on your own? I can work through the sleepiness if you need me to.”

  “Nope; you and Clutter just rest and relax. I’ll go back to the tower when I’m done here, take another quick nap, and then we’ll go back to the plastic paindne to keep exploring.” I smile and reach up to pat Pearl’s head. “You just make sure you’re in prime condition to help me with whatever the quest can throw at us.”

  “Mmh. Okay.” She says as her eyes close a little more, and she climbs into her shell. “Don’t do anything pointlessly dangerous.”

  I shake my head with a dry chuckle. “I’ve had enough of that for one day, don’t you worry about that.”

  She stares at me for a second like she doesn’t believe me, but eventually turns away to lie down on what I assume is a bed. Her expressive eyes watch me for a few seconds as they slowly close, and before thirty seconds can pass, she’s off to dreamland. I roll my shoulder and look around the room once more, lingering on the machines and the construct corpses for a little longer than everything else.

  I go for one of the majority constructs first; one that doesn’t even chip. Doesn’t matter which one I take, so I grab a random one and bring it over to the table. Without Pearl here I can’t actually run any of the machines, but I can try a few things and identify some parts for later. I’m not sure how much later it’s going to be, but I’m pretty sure that Clutter’s going to be out for at least a little while.

  The construct disappears into my inventory, and I tap on its square to get started.

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  Close to three hours later, I’ve got the start of what I’d call a lead. It wasn’t hard work to access my inventory and swap between my map and the construct body over and over again, watching it react every time I touch the thing, but decoding what each jerk and twitch means is even now a work in progress.

  All I can say for sure is that a tap inside of the tower’s radius gets an aggressive lurch out of the thing. Working from the assumption that said lurch is the command the quest gave it to attack the tower, I started tapping everywhere else I could think of on the map to try and get other twitches out of it. At first I thought it just spasmed no matter what, but there’s a slightly different reaction depending on which direction I tap.

  Northwards, its limbs tense up for a split second before the spasm. East starts with a weaker series of twitches that works up into a full-blown spasm. South goes full-blast from the get-go, and west has a slight delay before anything happens at all. I have absolutely no idea what any of them mean, but it definitely has something to do with whatever lies in those directions.

  I groan as I stretch my arms above my head, a page of scribbled notes staring back at me from my Class Card. Something tells me that grey magic is the key to this, too, and that filling one of the construct heads with the stuff will force it to do… something. Maybe return to sender, or go to its last designated location before the quest took them over.

  ‘Course I don’t have any proof of that. Don’t even have proof that these things have other destinations programmed into them, or that the quest didn't just make them for the sake of making them. I even ran the exact same tests on the more brittle ones, and they reacted exactly the same way. No difference at all. There’s got to be a secret there, but I have no idea how to get at it.

  I lean on my elbow, cheek in my palm, and nudge the construct with my other hand. Right now it just feels like we’re running around in the dark with absolutely no direction. Is this what the quest wants us to do? Are other people making real progress while we’re stuck here wondering about the first enemy that attacked us?

  The dim light of my Class Card glows constantly, almost mockingly, against the unnatural lighting. All the current objective provides is a cryptic hint about moving forward. I really want to find something–anything–concrete to go by. A treasure to hunt, or an ancient ruin to explore, or a temple to defend from an onslaught. Not whatever bullshit the quest expects of us right now.

  “Guess there’s nothing to do but explore.” I say to myself and send the construct body to my inventory. “Until we find something, we’ll just be running around in circles from one dead end to another.”

  I climb onto the table, open a doorway, and pull myself into the tower. No horrible tapping meets my ears, but the air is starting to smell… stale. The tower will probably switch to air intake sooner rather than later, though if everything goes the way I want it to, we won’t be here by then. Which probably means I’ll have to manually change it, or else we’ll come back to this. I make a mental note to do just that as I climb the stairs, my awareness soaking over the scenery until it reaches Clutter’s sleeping form. In exactly the same position we left him.

  Pearl stirs before I reach the top, rolls over in her bed, and blinks lazily. “Is it time?”

  “As long as Clutter’s up.”

  “Mrgh.” She says with a nod. “Then it’s time. Your footsteps are waking him up.”

  Clutter slowly sits up as I poke my head into the room at the top of the tower, rubs his eyes, and lets out a titanic yawn. I spare a glance at the window, which has completely cleared up, but dark stains on the wall serve as a reminder of what was there just a few hours ago. At least the wind’s gone down–and now the gusts just sit on the wall like discarded cardboard cutouts.

  “I feel better.” He hastily says before I can get anything out. “You don’t need to leave me behind.”

  “Didn’t plan on it.” I motion at the window. “Do you want to talk about… them?”

  His eyes follow my motion, and he laughs weakly. “Nope. Not at all. Did anything else happen while I was asleep?”

  I shake my head. “Not much. We got confirmation that the magic is tainted by the construct bodies, and that they’re all actually different, but nothing really new. So we’re back to running down the halls and hoping that something sticks out.”

  He groans and covers his eyes with his palm. “I hate that plan. You’re sure there’s nothing else we can try? Something with… less of a chance to almost kill us?”

  “Nope; we need grey magic and more power for the tower. Once we’ve got one of the two, then we can try something else. Until then, it’s running time.”

  “Aw.”

  I snort out a laugh and offer him a hand. “I’m right there with you, buddy.”

  He accepts it with a small smile, and I pull him to his feet. My coat tags along thanks to his other hand, and he offers it to me with an even smaller smile.

  “Thanks.”

  I accept the jacket and shrug into it. “No problem at all. Too bad we don’t really have any pillows, though. Would’ve made all this sleeping we’re doing a little more comfortable.”

  “Yeah. Comfortable.” He repeats with a yawn. “Is she up too?”

  Pearl pops her head out of her shell and waves. Clutter nods as much to her as to himself, and makes his way to the stairs as he scratches a claw along his gum line. There’s a little black stain there, but it flecks away from a little pressure, so it must’ve been the remnant of the last thing we ate before we came here.

  We quickly descend the stairs, open the door to the room with doors, and stop before the door that leads to the plastic paindne. That place is blatantly different from our own section of the walls, so it’s the best place to keep looking for… well… anything, I guess.

  As long as something doesn’t find us first.